Growing Marketshare

Conventional wisdom says that you will never know your customers' business as well as they do since they live it everyday. You don't. But above average marketshare gains require, and demand, you anticipate your customers’ next move so your solutions, not just products and services, are positioned for their next growth spurt.

There is no silver bullet for growing marketshare but, there are guiding principles that help ensure you look in right direction and places that increases the likelihood of beating the competition over the long haul to gain an increasing market and customer share-of-wallet.

Vaxa works with our clients so you get to know your customers, as well if not better than they know themselves resulting in repeatable, year-over-year marketshare gains.

What We Do

Our Approach

InSights

Client Results

Tab Content One

No doubt, strategy can be and is complex. But it is not always necessary to address complexity with complexity. Instead, why not use the fundamentals, the common sense approaches that are often the basis for success. We look at seven dimensions when helping clients to grow their share of wallet in markets they already serve.

How differentiated or advantaged are your customers insights?

Do you see or know something about your customers' business others don't? If not, a competitor eventually will. It's about inside-the-customer box and less out-of-the-box thinking. When Vaxa helps clients to step and walk in the shoes of its customers, they develop better strategies, products, services, & solutions that increase their customers' share of wallet.

Which of your expertise not offered to customers will strengthen your value proposition?

You are more than the products you sell to your customers. What current assets do you have that can be made available to customers that will take the relationship to the next level? More attention needs to be on taking a step back and assessing what other expertise can create a step-wise change your customers' mindshare in you which can translate into more sales?

Vaxa's Customer Immersion model is an innovative tool that helps our clients to get a much deeper understanding of their customers' unmet needs and pain points and then translate those new insights into custom solutions.

How is today's strategy anticipating competitive moves?

Your share is unlikely to change, or worst, decline, if your strategy is not adapting to anticipate competitive moves. Vaxa intelligence expertise goes deep into the crevices your competitors' business and capabilities which helps you to beat them when and where it matters—in front of customers! Our competitive intelligence paints a broad picture but quickly transitions to going much deeper into specific areas like sales & marketing, R&D, manufacturing, operations, and anticipating strategic moves like acquisitions.

How much ahead is your strategy of major trends and shaping forces?

Powerful trends and shaping forces have created completely new industries in the last decade. Vaxa is often dumbfounded as to why some industry bellwethers didn't see the writing on the wall regarding mobility, design, and digitization. It's too late for some—Vaxa trends expertise can help you to create a proactive strategy.

What has been done to minimize strategic and tactical biases?

We are all flawed in some way. The trick is to find ways to minimize these imperfections. At Vaxa, we first let the facts speak for themselves through external market based analyses, then layer a healthy dose of business judgement and reality on top to ensure decisions are practical and grounded.

Is how to increase your share-of-wallet actionable?

Strategy without action is no strategy at all. Actionable relative to the investment and resource allocation, level of increased value delivered to customers, and how that translates into increased revenues and margins for you. In our view, value delivered to customers without reciprocity is not valuable to you.

Do you know what you don't know?

What am I missing should be at the fore of every executive's mind. One way of calming this paranoia is to learn from industries far removed from your own—so that you end up asking "Why didn't we think of that?"—creating so-called ah-ha moments. For example. Vaxa infused ideas from the toy industry into advanced medical devices to help our client see how it's possible to put life saving equipment into the hands of the everyday person.

At this stage, you have been serving your customers for a long time. They have been buying your products and services for many years, in some cases, you may have an annuity relationship. But loyalty is tenuous, so you need to be more than just sure but absolutely sure you are constantly gaining much deeper insights into your customers' than before. Our goal is delivering these differentiating insights to you.

Tab Content Two

Vaxa uses multiple lenses to help our clients uncover new major short and long term revenue pools with their customers which includes tackling questions such as:

Why isn't there a higher adoption of your current products or services with specific customer segments?

What makes the competitors’ solutions so much more attractive than yours? How can you minimize or eliminate the customer switching costs?

How critical are your solutions in helping your customers to succeed and to their future growth? What do you have to do so they have a higher reliance on you?

How do your current and future solutions help customers tackle some of their most pressing problems they have yet to solve? What major issues do they see on the horizon that they want to but just haven't yet?

Apart from straight sales, what are the partnering opportunities with your customers to leverage your other capabilities and assets to act as new launching points for you to help your customers up their game.

We work independently yet collaboratively with client teams to formulate the best ways to engage with their customers. Where it makes sense, we design our assignments to bring the client teams together with their customers to have structured interactions focusing on specific issues. This takes a significant amount of planning to ensure everyone comes away seeing the value of investing their time.

Tab Content Three

There are numerous elements that drive marketshare, some of which are within your control and some not. But there are three essential issues that drive your product strategy, organization, and sales & marketing and ultimately, your marketshare. They are:

Can you help your customers do something better not something new?

We live in a world where many things are the same just much better.

In much the same way Apple made the phone, music player, and the listening experience orders of magnitude better, there are enormous opportunities to help customers dramatically upgrade existing ways of doing business with higher utility, less effort, and with better outcomes—which makes incremental improvements look as if it was a totally new solution to an old problem.

There are major shocks to entire industries waiting in the wings. For example, the cable industry's consumer model has not changed for decades. The quality of the picture has been enhanced due to digitization but the delivery mechanism and the value to the consumer has been the same for three decades.

Cable has an opportunity to incrementally increase the viewer experience through some basic upgrades, for example, improved remote controls. The remote is the device that stands between the viewing public and the programs transmitted by the cable companies. Why then will the cable companies provide a substandard device and leave it to companies outside of the industry to offer more attractive solutions?

To uncover pockets of incremental, if not major opportunities from existing customers, it means going to much deeper levels of details than have been done before. This requires rethinking your customer engagement model.

What makes competitors more successful?

What do Apple, Whole Foods, American Express, and Allianz have in common? They all deliver great customer experiences. Each from a different industry but they all clearly understand not just what the customer want right now but what will exceed their expectations down the road.

When they do so, it is with the intent of delivering a customer experience their competition can't.

Above all else, they know that sustainable growth comes from a combination of increasing share from current customers and entering new markets—with a little more emphasis on the former.

It’s not just the products, it is the aurora created by the entire experience of being associated with the products that differentiates the market leader from the number two or three player. There is no better salesperson than a customer touting your praises.

Companies serving the same customer group look alike to customers since they experience each company through the external interactions. What is not visible to the customer or competitors is all the behind the scenes systems, processes, and procedures that go to exceed the customer expectations.

Leaders tends to have an extra edge by being that much more clear about what it takes to give customers what not just what they are asking for but that something extra they did not know they needed.

In some fiercely competitive markets, this is what Apple has done as well as Whole Foods, Cognizant Technologies, American Express, Jet Blue, USAA, and McDonald's.

Your depth of understanding of your customers

All too often, companies go on auto-pilot when they acquire what appears to be a "reasonable" customer share-of-wallet. They make the leap that customers must be satisfied with today’s products and services so they continue doing more of the same. It is seldom that products or services satisfy the majority of customer needs—because they can rarely be relied upon to fully articulate their needs and they make trade-offs between the ideal solution and what is not necessary. Like most people, customers know a good idea or design when they see one—so it is incumbent on you to use as many alternate means to help your customers not only to validate their thinking but, more importantly, to see new facets of their challenges to solve that can result in you significantly increased your value to them.

How well your customers understand you?

"Knowing your customer" is a well worn mantra. Less talked about is how well do customers understand your capabilities and expertise beyond the products they buy from you.

There are several examples where customers work closely with product providers so each develops an intimate working knowledge of each other that contributes to both teams being able to provide insights to each based on a deeper mutual capability knowledge. These include commercial airplanes, cruise lines, and fire trucks.

Boeing and Airbus design airplane platforms based on a range of criteria like fuel efficiency and noise levels because they innately comprehend global macro trends like total cost of ownership and regulatory requirements but it is customers like American Airlines, British Airways, Qantas and others who provide the manufacturers additional direction for passenger ergonomics and comfort so the base airplanes can embed those critical elements that will give passengers what they want and need when flying. Similar relationships exist in the cruise-line industry.

The Firetruck industry is an interesting one and, in some aspects, as complex as car manufacturing. At first glance, all firetrucks look very similar except for shape and size. However, the features designed into each truck differs from city to city, even when they are part of the same county because of varying regulations and wants of the firefighters. Firetruck companies such as Pierce Manufacturing ensure they embed active firefighters into their design teams so firefighters understand the technologies that go into designing and manufacturing the truck and can help direct the final products.When customers better appreciate your broader expertise, they can talk more expansively about their challenges and help you to see how all your assets can be brought together to help solve their problems.

Tab Content Three

The only way to understand unmet or under-served customers' needs is to engage with different parts of your customers' organization. This is about interacting up and down and across the functions so you create a more complete rubric cube view of what works and do not work for your customers. This drives more mindshare and marketshare.

The following client case study is one way that we work with clients.

Staving off customer defections with loyalty

THE CHALLENGE

Part of RegBankCo growth strategy was to increase loyalty among its affluent customers to increase their share-of-wallet.

The bank has a substantial presence in the US Northeastern states with over 1.5 million clients. For two years, they saw increasing customer defections resulting from their brand being under pressure from a combination of factors from the economy and a decreasing mortgage market.. The loyalty initiative was one way of clawing back customers.

RegBankCo retained Vaxa to help define a loyalty program to ensure current customers stay with the bank, attract new customers, and ultimately increase customer share-of-wallet.

DISCOVERY

Vaxa's research took several but inter-related tracks:

Compare RegBankCo recent performance with regional competitors to see if losses at RegBankCo were gains by other banks and the determining what is compelling about those competitors' value proposition,

Engage with current customers to find out what they like and what improvements they want to see from the bank,

Conduct detailed discussions with customers who left the bank to uncover the key dissatisfiers that triggered defections,

Look to industries adjacent to and outside of banking to uncover the best-in-class customer loyalty programs.

RESULTS

Given the outcomes of the research and broader industry analysis, we recommended a multi-dimensional customer rewards program for different account types, credit and debit cards, and length of time customers are with the bank.

Within three of months of execution, RegBankCo saw a 33k increase in its customer base and 125k jump in eighteen months.

We should talk

Let's discuss how we can deliver similar results for you as we have done for other companies.

"We were looking to grow our presence in the Federal Government segment and Vaxa was instrumental in helping us to deeply understand the customer perception of our company and solutions and what we had to do to gain more more traction. Their market engagement model is truly creative yet fact-based."

-- VP, Corporate Strategy

Delivering Results. Smartly.

We deliver real results by helping you to see first what others will see eventually.